Page 69 - Sharp Spring 2021

wood’s most prominent Asian–American actors. These pressures are compounded somewhat by Korean culture and its creators enjoying, in the language of trendspotting headlines, “a moment,” with Hollywood gatekeepers welcoming movies, music, and TV shows imported from the peninsula. Just look to the success of Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning thriller Parasite or the cultural crossover of boy bands like BTS, and Korean pop music more generally. “Parasite or BTS represents me to a degree,” he admits. “But it doesn’t really represent me. That’s Korea itself. That’s cool. That’s a stretching of culture on a global scale. But I really want to focus on making sure I’ve carved out a foundation for the nominal existence that I live in. If I don’t, I worry I’ll get swallowed up by the global conversation.”
“Aren’t we all living a bit of an immigrant existence in this pandemic? The feelings of isolation. The feelings of exile from each other. The feelings of being lonely.
Minari, Yeun’s latest performance, for which he’s nabbed a best actor Oscar nomination, feels like a much more intimate conversation. It’s the story of a Korean–American family de- camping from California to rural Arkansas. Living out of a trailer on an empty patch of earth, patriarch Jacob (Yeun) sets to work pursuing his dream of living off the land, growing traditional Korean produce for immigrant communities in the area. His plot is beset by issues — a well dries up, orders are cancelled — resulting in a near-maniacal doubling down. Jacob obsesses over the land’s fertility, ignoring the strain it puts on his family.
To be quite honest with you, that’s shit I’ve been feeling my whole life.”
Written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, Minari plays like a tribute to the second-generation immigrant experience. It’s an attempt by Korean–Americans like Chung and Yeun to relate to their parents’ generation, whose identities felt more mean- ingfully cleaved between two worlds. “Immigration slowly separates generations,” Yeun says. “You start forming more into the Western world while they keep tethering themselves to what they left.” Minari offers a complicated look at the im- migrant dream of America. It’s a film in which a man realizes that there’s no great promise buried somewhere in the soil of a new world, and that, cheesy as it sounds, the real journey is not about the assimilation of an immigrant to a new land or its dreams, but what Yeun sees as “the assimilation of the family to itself, and to each other.”
says. “There’s this deep connection running through the two generations. Some people are able to access it a little easier. Myself? I never had those conversations. It was always, 'my Korean parents.' Being able to play this role allowed me to contextualize them, and realize that I am an extension of my parents; I am my parents. Now I can have a real conversation with him, instead of talking to him in ways that seem detached and performative. Like you’re role-playing. Now, we’re connecting and meeting as human beings. It’s been a trip.”
Yeun says, “I feel like the power of this film is amplified by this moment...Aren’t we all living a bit of an immigrant existence in this pandemic? The feelings of isolation. The feelings of exile from each other. The feelings of being lonely. To be quite honest with you, that’s shit I’ve been feeling my whole life.”
Minari premiered at Sundance Film Festival early in 2020, one of the last big cultural to-dos before the coronavirus pan- demic gripped the planet. The film took home the prestigious U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award. But for Yeun, the film offered a more profound reward. He watched it at Sundance with his own father. And he felt those barriers between generations begin to yield a bit.
Much of this trip has, of course, been figurative. The pan- demic has hampered Minari’s route through the global festival circuit and traditional theatrical distribution. And while Yeun doesn’t mind skipping out on the red carpets and relentless press junkets and festival Q&As that see participants framing long-winded observations as questions, he does lament that the film, by and large, is missing a big-screen run. Still, as he acknowledges, Minari is a film about family, and it’s bound to hit even harder reaching people in their homes. “In some ways,”
Yeun may seem like some convenient, cross-cultural figure — whether as the worldly socialite Ben, the American assimilationist hopeful Jacob, or the Korean-to-English translator in Bong Joon-ho’s 2017 Okja. But the actor seems determined to collapse such distinctions. He’s right that pegging people as clear links between cultures and continents can constitute its own kind of stock, clichéd thinking. “I can’t change the way that my ethnicity explains itself,” Yeun says, unafraid to get personal and philosophical. “I think everybody wants to be represented for themselves. We’re in a journey in this conversation. We have to have so many people representing Asian–America that this monolithic feeling can go away. And we can just stick to the humanity and the individual.”
“What I realized making this film, which I think a lot of people realize, is that you’re so similar to your parents,” he